The Regent eBook

“Well,” said Mr. Alloyd, curtly, with
a sardonic smile. “They’ve telephoned
me all about it. I’ve seen Mr. Wrissell.
Just my luck! So you’re the man! He
pointed you out to me this morning. My design
for that church would have knocked the West End!
Of course Mr. Wrissell will pay me compensation, but
that’s not the same thing. I wanted the
advertisement of the building.... Just my luck!
Have a drink, will you?”

Edward Henry ultimately went with the plaintive Mr.
Alloyd to his rooms in Adelphi Terrace. He quitted
those rooms at something after two o’clock in
the morning. He had practically given Mr. Alloyd
a definite commission to design the Regent Theatre.
Already he was practically the proprietor of a first-class
theatre in the West End of London!

“I wonder whether Master Seven Sachs could have
bettered my day’s work to-day!” he reflected
as he got into a taxi-cab. He had dismissed his
electric brougham earlier in the evening. “I
doubt if even Master Seven Sachs himself wouldn’t
be proud of my little scheme in Eaton Square!”
said he.... “Wilkins’s Hotel, please,
driver.”

PART II

CHAPTER VII

CORNER-STONE

I

On a morning in spring Edward Henry got out of an
express at Euston which had come, not from the Five
Towns, but from Birmingham. Having on the previous
day been called to Birmingham on local and profitable
business, he had found it convenient to spend the night
there and telegraph home that London had summoned
him. It was in this unostentatious, this half-furtive
fashion, that his visits to London now usually occurred.
Not that he was afraid of his wife! Not that he
was afraid even of his mother! Oh, no! He
was merely rather afraid of himself—­of
his own opinion concerning the metropolitan, non-local,
speculative and perhaps unprofitable business to which
he was committed. The fact was that he could
scarcely look his women in the face when he mentioned
London. He spoke vaguely of “real estate”
enterprise, and left it at that. The women made
no inquiries; they too left it at that. Nevertheless
...!

The episode of Wilkins’s was buried, but it
was imperfectly buried. The Five Towns definitely
knew that he had stayed at Wilkins’s for a bet,
and that Brindley had discharged the bet. And
rumours of his valet, his electric brougham, his theatrical
supper-parties, had mysteriously hung in the streets
of the Five Towns like a strange vapour. Wisps
of the strange vapour had conceivably entered the
precincts of his home, but nobody ever referred to
them; nobody ever sniffed apprehensively nor asked
anybody else whether there was not a smell of fire.
The discreetness of the silence was disconcerting.
Happily his relations with that angel his wife were
excellent. She had carried angelicism so far
as not to insist on the destruction of Carlo; and
she had actually applauded, while sticking to her white
apron, the sudden and startling extravagances of his
toilette.